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Television

Camp am-dram, plus stuff about the patriarchy: Channel 5's Anne Boleyn reviewed

5 June 2021

9:00 AM

5 June 2021

9:00 AM

Anne Boleyn

Channel 5

Fifty-one years ago, in the BBC’s much-acclaimed The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn was portrayed as a brave and innocent woman brought low by the men around her, notably Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell.

Even then, of course, this was by no means an unconventional view. Only the previous year, the film Anne of the Thousand Days — nominated for ten Oscars — had taken a similar line, as indeed had Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563), which objected to all ‘sinister judgments and opinions… against the virtuous queen’.

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